Eight older women are sitting in a bathtub-sized bowl of ramen. Their hair has been blown into enormous grey clouds by the steam. There's a fried egg the size of a manhole cover floating next to them, a wall of spinach, and behind the whole thing a working noodle factory where other women in chef whites are calmly plating sushi like none of this is unusual.
They're laughing. Not the scale of the bowl, the fact that everyone in the frame is having a great time.
That's the Auntieverse, which the Singapore artist niceaunties has been building since January 2023. Elsewhere in it: two aunties in chef's hats slicing a salmon fillet the size of a dining table while a giant frog watches from behind two moons. A mirror-tiled cat head the size of a house, parked in the middle of a garden party. A kitchen where every surface, appliance and wire is the same shade of yellow, and one woman in purple is quietly cooking dinner in the middle of it while a cat hangs off the wall.
The rules are consistent even when nothing else is. Ageing women are the main characters, food is usually the setting, and nobody in the frame is surprised.
The Image Comes First
She's been unusually specific about how a piece gets made, which is rarer than it should be.
"I always start with the image," she said in a long interview about her practice. "So I make an image, and then I animate it, and then a sequence of this footage comes together to become a video."
That's the whole spine of it, and it's the opposite of how most people approach AI video — start with a shot description, generate motion, hope the frames hold together. She builds a still she's happy with, brings that still to life, and only then thinks about sequence.
The iteration count is the other number worth knowing. "For one video, I will have at least 25 to 30 prompts to get to what you see." Turnaround runs from a few hours to a month, and half a day is the floor.
On prompting itself she's matter-of-fact: "Prompting is basically the language you use to communicate with the program, the machine. So to get a good prompt you need to experiment and iterate a lot."
The part that comes before any of that is the part she says takes the longest.
"I spend a lot of time dreaming and marinating ideas before I prompt."
That squares with how the pictures are put together. "My art tends to be a collage of things and objects that do not typically exist together" — which is a decision made in advance, not a thing a model hands you. Manuela Klauser works the same way round, settling what the piece is before the tool gets involved.
Nineteen Years of Drawing Buildings
Wenhui Lim spent nineteen years in architecture before any of this.
You can see where it went. The compositions are frequently sectional — a whole environment cut open so you can see every level of it at once, the factory floor and the mezzanine and the bowl all legible in a single frame. That's an architectural drawing convention applied to a picture of women in soup. Multiple vantage points held in one image, everything readable, nothing hidden behind anything else.
She's described the shift in what starts a project. "Working in architecture, you're always working with a developer," she told STIR in a piece on the Barcelona show. "But in the Auntieverse, it didn't start from that place. I was thinking about this character of the aunty and how to reframe her."
Same drafting instincts, no client. The brief is hers now.
She got into it the way a lot of people did — saw images on Instagram in late 2022, found out they were Midjourney, went down the hole. By July 2023 she'd made something on the order of 40,000 images, a figure worth reading as a snapshot of that first stretch rather than a current count.
Where the Aunties Have Ended Up
The list is longer than you'd expect for a practice three years old. A TED talk in Vancouver in 2024. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The V&A in London during its 2024 Digital Art Weekend. The AI Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2025. Christie's Art + Tech conference in New York. Paris Photo. Work with Swatch and L'Oréal.
There's also been a billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles — Aunties on Sunset — which is a genuinely funny place for this material to land. Ageing Asian women at monumental scale on the same stretch of road that sells everything else.
Right now the main thing is Auntiescapes at Load Gallery in Barcelona, running May 7 to August 15, 2026. At its centre is an interactive piece called Mirror into the Auntieverse, where your reflection is replaced by an auntie who tells you what she thinks. Other works in the show include Cycles, Auntiecity and Auntlantis.
Her own summary of the project is one sentence: "There is an auntie in all of us. I'm building the Auntieverse to understand what that means."
The Barcelona show has a few weeks left on it, and the portfolio is where the rest lives.